No holidays for GAFA and technologies, we recap you everything in the Top IT news of August seen by Wisper

No holidays for GAFA and technologies, we recap you everything in the Top IT news of August seen by Wisper

Get the latest tech news of the month by reading what’s follow. We will talk about several digital giants (I named GAFA) and other development and trends in technology. August was finally well busy, a lot of news has drew our attention lately. Here’s a cool little selection of Wisper to liven up your discussions at coffee breaks!

TOP 1: Google follows you wherever you go, even if you have turned off geolocation.

And yet you would have been warned, since this practice is reported under the terms of use under a small asterisk … This is an Associated Press (AP) investigation published on Monday, August 13th, which reveals this lack of confidentiality affecting the 2 billion users of Android (the operating system developed by Google) and millions of iPhone users who use Google maps or the search engine.

If you really want to erase your data, it’s pretty tedious, because you have to delete them one by one on myactivity.google.com.

To go further, we can question what this implies … Forbes revealed a few days ago that the FBI had tried to compel Google to identify anyone located near institutions that were the target of a series of burglaries. For the moment, the leaders do not seem to have responded to the request of the police force. But this is not the first time that this has happened and if the information was actually disclosed, a large number of innocent people would then be included among the potential suspects.

TOP 2: Then comes the payback time!

Indeed, a small team of students AI (Artificial Intelligence) coders managed to beat Google researchers by creating a more powerful AI algorithm than the American firm.

They are simple enthusiastic machine learning students, working part-time at Fast.ai (a small unit that offers free online courses in machine learning). These geniuses of machine learning have achieved the performance of getting results faster than Google on roughly equivalent hardware.

State-of-the-art results are not the exclusive domain of big companies !

TOP 3: Visit of the Apple Data Center.

And if we move to another giant GAFA (the acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon): the one built by Steve Jobs, I mean Apple. The company invited the regional newspaper Arizona Republic to visit its huge Mesadata centerwhich spans 1.3 millions square feet, with long, sparse hallways equipped with servers.And yet, discretion is required in these most business-critical assets for tech companies. Between the many teams that take turns to control and monitor the various services and the external appearance of the building that does not show anything about what it contains, it is all the more surprising that Apple let the cameras enter in the building.

Apple’s next project in Mesa is to add solar panels to power the data center to offset the power consumption of its servers.

The data center of Apple. Phot credit: Mac Génération

Top 4 : A Data center underwater for microsoft

Do you know the other acronym of the digital giants: GAFAM. The M is for Microsoft of course!

Why talk now about Microsoft? The Microsoft data center settled off Scotland has installed underwater surveillance cameras. The reason is simple, the Microsoft Natick project is to submerge data centers, to cool them, and this allows much more energy savings. Their goal is also to get closer to the population living on the coasts as their slogan says “50% of the population lives near the coast, why not our data?”.

The data center has impressive dimensions: it is more than 12 meters long by 2.8 meters in diameter and hosts a total of 864 servers with a storage capacity of 27.6 petabytes.

So if you’re interested in seeing hundreds of fish swimming around this Microsoft capsule, you just have to go on the project site.

Natick project of Microsoft. Photo credit : Actunautique.com

Top 5: And if the technology could also serve to fight against inequalities ?

Sometimes technology could also help fight inequalities…

Wikipedia appears have a gender problem, for one. Did you know that only 18% of Wikipedia’ biographic entries were about female scientists ? That’s the reason why the American start-up Primer developed a gender gap-filling tool called “Quicksilver”. It’s a software that identifies forgotten scientists on the platform and writes a first draft.

The bot has crossed the Wikipedia pages of researchers with a list from the academic search engine Semantic Scholar listing more than 200 000 scientific authors. Then, he was trained to write short biographical texts from examples from a collection of 500 million news articles.

In one night, Quicksilver doubled the number of scientists eligible for an article.

So ladies, to your keyboards! Go ahead and write the Wikipedia pages of the many women who are still missing on the encyclopedia!

This month breaking news briefing !

Google plan to launch a censored search engine in China.

This project named “dragonfly” will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protest, as was revealed by the American press. More than 1.000 Google employees have signed a letter protesting against the company’s secretive plan. They calls for more transparency as they fear they have been unwittingly working on technology that will help China suppress free expression. It’s also seems to violate the “don’t be evil” clause in Google’s code of conduct.

Apple hacked for a year … by a teenager!

The 16-year-old from Australia has admitted hacking into Apple’s internal network and stealing 90GB worth of files. Nevertheless, Apple assures “that no personal data was compromised during the incident”. Note that this young hacker claimed to be a “fan” of the company, and dreamed of working for Apple one day …

Google is making a smart coach that will whip you into shape.

Google Coach will get all your workout data to recommend workout routines. It will also come up with meal plans, shopping lists tailored to your goals. While it might come across as a bit intrusive, it’s heading to the future of wearables that provides meaningful analysis of our vitals data in real time.

In the digital world, the trend is towards “disconnection”.

In any case, many smartphone manufacturers are embarking on digital wellbeing. Research has shown for several years that addiction to phones would have effects on the mental health of adolescents in particular. Between the functionalities to visualize its digital activity or the possibility of limiting its daily use time, application and operating system designers are finally taking seriously the concepts of digital health and addiction to the smartphone.

No holidays for GAFA and technologies, we recap you everything in the Top IT news of August seen by Wisper

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